"Hungry to belong". Food, media and identity in IsraEnglish.

The title of the thesis refers to the song ‘Genes and Jeans’ (2008) by the Israeli singer Achinoam Nini (Noa). Through the questions “Can I wear your jeans?” and “Can I were your genes?”, the author expresses the desire of belonging shared by immigrants worldwide, and particularly in Israel, a country inhabited by people coming from around 100 different nations. Her Jewish Yemenite origins are evident in the music and in the vernacular lyrics, her “mother’s voice”. The desire of the Self to adhere the Other’s identity collides in her words with the vanity of the efforts ‘to metamorphasize’. Referring to the case of Israel, “hungry to belong” communicates right this inner tension characterising the negotiation of identity both at individual and social level. No other expression could suit better the title of this research, a study focusing on the relationship between food English and identity in the Israeli media. The specific domain of food was chosen since it is one of the most symbolic aspects of identity and can be emblematically representative of its depiction in the media. Food language is therefore intertwined not only with the identity dynamics occurring in the Israeli ethnic, social and cultural context, but also with media policies. The subject, since involving at the same time several disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology and communication studies, lacks almost completely a specific bibliography. Notwithstanding the publication of studies concerning single academic sectors, an integrated approach is still absent. The Israeli linguistic context has been investigated by scholars for decades, among others Fishman (1985; 1996; 2001), Ben Rafael (1994), Lefkowitz (2004), Blum-Kulka (1997), Suleiman (1996; 2004) for sociolinguistic issues related to identity, style and pragmatics, Spolsky (with Cooper 1991; 1997; with Shohamy 1999 and 2001) and Shohamy (2006; 2009) for language policy, and Zuckermann (2003) for Israeli Hebrew contact linguistics. As far as the Israeli linguistic repertoire is concerned, nevertheless, mainly interactions in Hebrew or Arabic have been taken into consideration, but little attention has been paid to English, above all in its written form employed by English-language media. The dynamics of identity in Israel have been deeply investigated, among others, by Ben Rafael (1994), Shafir and Peled (2002) and Lefkowitz (2004). The connection between identity and food language in the media however has not been investigated yet. Food is a subject dealt with at different levels, not only by food writers and journalists but also by scholars , who generally approach the subject from a historical and anthropological point of view (among others, Heine 2004; Gvion 2009; Ram 2004; Cohen and Avieli 2004). This study is an effort to add a significant and innovative contribution to the discussion concerning the relationship between food language and identity as presented by the Israeli media. The research offers several elements of originality: a)the main topic, i.e. IsraEnglish intended as a developing Israeli local variety of English; b) food columns as corpus, a kind of features whose relevance at linguistic, political and social level is often underestimated and almost ignored by academics; c) the description of phenomena of language contact affecting IsraEnglish, instead of the much more extensively studied contact trends in Hebrew; d) the integration of different disciplines (linguistics, media and communication studies, history, political studies, and anthropology). The research aims to five main targets: a) confirming that an Israeli variety of English (IsraEnglish) is actually emerging; b) defining a glossary of food IsraEnglish terms; c) defining the lexical core of food IsraEnglish; d) describing the dynamics of language contact which are at the basis of food IsraEnglish; e) describing the role of language in the representation of identity in Israeli food journalism. The research was developed through the analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, of a corpus of food features made up of 500.000 words (tokens) collected from The Jerusalem Post. A software of corpus analysis, Wordsmith Tools, was employed for the definition of a list of food nouns present in the articles analysed. All terms identified as non-standard English food nouns were given a definition to form a glossary. From the list of terms, the ‘core’ of food IsraEnglish was isolated, first by distinguishing local terms from those linked to globalised international cuisines and then by checking their non-inclusion in mainstream British and American English dictionaries (given the general prescriptive attitude of dictionaries, the addition of a term would have implied its inclusion in the Standard English lexicon). Some phenomena of language contact, such as borrowings, loanwords etc. were then presented and discussed in detail. By connecting language and identity, the linguistic analysis lead to the identification of the most common languages used to deal with food in the English-language Israeli media, hence to the most represented identities. The issue was discussed also referring to social, political and anthropologic studies concerning the history and the representation of food in Israel. Selected bibliography Ben Rafael, Eliezer 1994. Language, identity and social division: the case of Israel. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1997. Dinner talk: Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Cohen, Erik /Avieli, Nir 2004. Food in Tourism. Attraction and Impediment. Annals of Tourism Research, 31/4, 755-778. Fishman, Joshua A. 1985. Readings in the sociology of Jewish Languages. Leiden: Brill. Fishman, Joshua A. 1996. Post Imperial English. Status change on former British and American Colonies, 1940-1990. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fishman, Joshua A. 2001. Can threatened languages be saved? Reversing language shift, revisited: a 21st century perspective. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Gvion, Liora 2009. Narrating Modernity and Tradition: The case of Palestinian Food in Israel, Identities 16/4, 391-413. Heine, Peter 2004. Food Culture in the Near East, Middle East and North Africa. Westport: Greenwood. Lefkowitz, David 2004. Words and stones. The politics of language and identity in Israel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ram, Uri 2004. Glocommodification: How the Global Consumes the Local – McDonald’s in Israel. Current Sociology 52/1, 11-31. Shafir, Gershon / Peled, Yoav 2002. Being Israeli. The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shohamy, Elana 2006. Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches. London: Routledge. Shohamy, Elana /Gorter, Durk (eds.) 2009. Linguistic Landscapes: Expanding the Scenery. New York:Routledge. Spolsky, Bernard / Cooper Robert L. 1991. The languages of Jerusalem. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Spolsky, Bernard / Shohamy, Elana 1999. The Languages of Israel. Policy, Ideology and Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Spolsky, Bernard / Shohamy, Elana 2001. The penetration of English as a Language of Science and Technology into the Israeli Linguistic Repertoire: a preliminary Enquiry. In Ammon Ulrich (ed.) The dominance of English as a Language of Science. Effects on other languages and other communities. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 167-176. Suleiman, Yasir 1996. Language and Identity in the Middle East and North Africa. Richmond: Routledge. Suleiman, Yasir 2004. A war of words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zuckermann, Ghil’ad 2003. Language Contact and Globalisation: The camouflaged influence of English on the world’s languages—with special attention to Israeli (sic) and Mandarin. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 16/ 2, 287- 307.